The music industry is fucked up beyond repair
The french pimps' association is suing general motors because one prostitute has been raped in a car.
Replace raped by "pirated", "pimp" by "record label", "car" by "software" and "GM" by "sourceforge"... and here comes the story:
Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF), an umbrella group for several record labels in France, claims that the four file-sharing applications facilitate mass copyright infringement. Although the companies (and applications) themselves have nothing to do with copyright infringement, SPFF believes it has a strong case.
Recent French legislation which inspired the labels to go after the P2P companies, suggests that all P2P applications must have a feature to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. The clients that are sued by SPFF obviously don’t have such a feature. In fact, it is questionable whether it would be technically possible to develop such a filter. Nevertheless, SPFF demands it, and is claiming millions of dollars in damages for lost revenue.
Interestingly, SPFF is also going after Sourceforge, the open source development website, because it hosts the P2P application Shareaza. Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, isstretching credibility beyond all bounds”
A valuable service that offers hosting to 1000th of programs, including one that, potentially, could be used for piracy has been considered a valid target to a court case.
